The benighted story of the Department of Education's perennially unraveling Primary Online Database of 5+year olds has been bouncing along for over a year now. If you were to scroll through a year's worth of this blog's posts you'd have a pretty good picture of what happened when, but you might also expire with tedium. It'd be a race to see which would happen first.

As longstanding, longsuffering readers will be aware, for the past year and a bit, I have been arguing that the Primary Online Database (POD) was illegal. Though that argument has not come to a conclusion (and I expect it to be successful) the Department of Education has been forced into a series of climbdowns along the way.

The documents below were withheld by the Department of Education following an FOI request. The Department produced an array of reasons for their refusal to release the below docs, which the Office of the Information Commissioner ultimately decided were invalid.

The Information Commissioner’s office has now published their binding decision in my appeal against the Department of Educations and Skill’s refusal to release certain documents relating to POD to me on foot of an FOI request. With the exception of one document (of which more shortly) all of the Department of Education’s refusals have been overturned.

Hey, wake up, there's a really annoying election campaign. One that everyone wishes would just leave them alone. The vote is on Friday, which is a blessed relief after the longest short election campaign in history.

I made a complaint regarding the treatment of Junior Infants data by the Department of Education in their latest effort to make their Primary Online Database legal. I received no substantial response, and so I forwarded the complaint to the Data Protection Commissioner. After that, I received the reply below.

Ever since the introduction of the Primary Online Database of schoolchildren by the Department of Education, the Department and its Minister have been eager to point out that any parent who refused to allow a child’s data to be transferred would see that child’s education defunded. Well, for all children other than this week’s crop of new Junior Infants, that threat has now collapsed.

The misbegotten Primary Online Database project is on its third piece of legislation designed to try to make it legal. On the 21st July, The Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton signed a Ministerial Order seeking to try to provide a legislative basis for the transfer of children’s data from schools to the Department of Education. You can take a look at SI 317 of 2015 here.